Interlocking Hearts Valentine Drawing

Here's a cool Valentine's project that teachers shading skills. I've taught this to Grade 6 students the past few years and they really enjoy it. 

I pre-cut manila tagboard into small squares. Students folded them in half and drew half a heart and they cut it out as well as the center. The hearts should be at least 1 cm thick so they're not too fragile. 

Then they trace it onto 9 x 12" drawing paper. They slightly overlap the hearts and then erase the correct lines so the two hearts are interlocked. This takes a bit of practice. 

Keep tracing and overlapping the hearts until the page is filled nicely. 

The next class I showed students how to shade the hearts so they look 3D. They could shade using either pencils or coloured pencils. 

Some Grade 6 results:

Animal Goes on Vacation Collage & Watercolour

Here in Canada, my province recently emerged from a week long cold spell- we're talking -42 C!!

So this vacation project was the perfect anecdote to visually escape the cold. I found this lesson from an art teacher on a Facebook group, "Art Teacher Life", I belong to.  This teacher is from Perth, Australia so she used an Australian animal (a quokka) for their version. 

See her art projects on Instagram @art__teacher__life

So I bought a bunch of calendars of holiday destinations. 

Buy your calendars in early January to get huge discounts of around 75% off like I did.

Grade 4 - 6 students chose a calendar page. 

Then they carefully cut away the sky.

On a sheet of 12 x 18 heavy white paper, students painted a sky of their choice. 

While the sky is drying, students drew a Canadian animal of their choice 

and coloured it in with coloured pencils.

Once the sky paper is dry, glue the calendar page on top.

Then cut out and glue on the animal. 

Some of the Grade 4 - 6 results!

Personalized Colour Wheel Paintings

This is a beautiful colour theory lesson perfect for the start of the year. This year I didn't manage to get to it until December for some reason though!

Grade7 - 9 students started by filling out a colour wheel- this is to be used as reference for the later steps. 

Then, on a long strip of cardstock, students design a long shape. Cut it out and this is the tracer. They trace this shape 12 times onto heavy white paper. Then they paint/colour each shape, following the colour wheel. Students could use any media they wanted to colour these- most used watercolours but others chose oil pastels, chalk pastel or tempera. 

Once dry, cut them all out. 

I pre-cut large squares of black construction paper. Students put a small circular container in the middle of the paper so they can lay their pieces around this to keep it all even. Getting the pieces spaced out evenly is, by far, the hardest part of this project. I started getting the kids to show me their composition before gluing as many of them had them unevenly spaced out. 

Grade 7 - 9 finished pieces: